As the acceptance of pagers and paging systems grow, the amount of useful information transmitted by paging systems also grows. Such information includes stock quotes, sports scores and news items. This kind of information is often time critical. That is, its value is only relevant at about the time it is transmitted by the paging system. For example, an intermediate score of an ongoing basketball game becomes obsolete very rapidly as the score changes. If the information is not read within a short time of its transmission, its value diminishes. Consequently, there is little reason to receive or store the information if a user of the information is not close at hand. Thus, it is desirable to develop a paging receiver capable of capitalizing on this phenomena.
Furthermore, this type information may be of interest to a large number of users within range of the paging system. Consequently, it is desirable to provide a very low cost device for of receiving and displaying the information so the large number of users could afford the capability of receiving this information. With the growing popularity of programmable personal computing devices such as the IBM PC and its clones or the Apple Macintosh, and their corresponding increase in computing power, programmable memory and information display facilities, it is desirable to use as much of the facility of such personal computers as possible to reduce the cost of an accessory for receiving, decoding and displaying this type of paging information.
Thus, what is needed is a very low cost accessory for a personal computer capable of receiving paging information.